August 11, 2017

Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny. – Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox

The richest men in the world are social media moguls. Their companies hire tens of thousands world-wide. Their products have infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives. Of course, their products often let us act out bad behaviors through tweets, posts, comments, etc. But the real dangers of social media may be in how the social media companies treat us as customers and as employees.

May 16, 2017

We know President Trump met with high level Russian officials. We know he talked with them about on-going actions taken against ISIS, as well as proposed security measures for air traffic. However, we do not know if he revealed classified information.

National Security Adviser Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster said Monday:

There’s nothing that the president takes more seriously than the security of the American people. The story that came out tonight as reported is false. The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries including threats to civil aviation. At no time, at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the President did not discuss any military operations that were not already publicly known. Two other senior officials who were present, including the secretary of state, remember the meeting the same way and have said so. Their on-the-record accounts should outweigh anonymous sources. And I was in the room, it didn’t happen.

Of course, there will be an investigation. If the Post’s accusations are accurate, then the Trump administration will need to take serious steps to assure this does not happen again, and lessen the damage done by a major security leak by the President. If the Post’s accusations are false, then the media must take responsibility for smearing the reputation of the President. Either way, the public will have lost faith in an important institution, either the White House or the Fourth Estate.

April 25, 2017

Politico’s Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty demonstrate that the media bias to the left is a function not only of who journalists are, but where they are. In “The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think, ” the authors point to the overwhelming shift from traditional newsprint and television to internet publishers as employers of journalists.

This isn’t just a shift in medium. It’s also a shift in sociopolitics, and a radical one. Where newspaper jobs are spread nationwide, internet jobs are not: Today, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix. The Chicagoland area, a traditional media center, captures 5 percent of the jobs, with a paltry 22 percent going to the rest of the country. And almost all the real growth of internet publishing is happening outside the heartland, in just a few urban counties, all places that voted for Clinton. So when your conservative friends use “media” as a synonym for “coastal” and “liberal,” they’re not far off the mark.

What makes their analysis so interesting is their application of social science techniques. It’s hard to argue against media bias when the evidence is “data-driven” and statistically obvious.

March 15, 2016

Donald Trump has been called a lot things by a lot of people. He’s been called Hitler, Mussolini, Julius Caesar and, my personal favorite, Loki the Trickster. (He does have the hair of a frost giant.) One Republican candidate calls him a con man. One former candidate says there are two of him. And one former candidate calls him “friend.” (Of course, that former candidate is known to have a man-crush every now and then.) Just about everybody calls him a liar.

However, the real Donald Trump is … Donald Trump. His act isn’t an act. It is who he is.